The outrage over the end of the CDC's eviction moratorium seems odd to me. We've known it was going to expire on July 31 for a long time, so why is everyone acting so shocked that it happened on schedule? And if it's really as big a deal as some people are making out, why weren't they yelling about it in May or June rather than July 29th? Did they not care enough? Or were they ignorant of how the moratorium worked?
In any case, if the CDC is truly following the best legal advice about the Supreme Court's ruling on the moratorium, then good for them. That's what we should expect them to do.
But I do have a question for moratorium supporters: When do you think it should expire? Should it depend on some set of economic parameters? Some kind of COVID goal? Something to do with payouts of rental assistance? It can't just be left in place forever, after all. To my eyes, the economy is finally doing pretty well; jobs are returning at higher pay than before the pandemic; and CTC payments have started going out. It seems like this is not such a bad time to let it go.
Also: given the large amount of general assistance provided during the pandemic—big checks, expanded UI, and now CTC—do we even know how many people are in danger of being evicted above normal rates? I haven't seen a credible estimate, and I'd like to.
POSTSCRIPT: Please note the modifier above normal rates in my penultimate sentence. It's important!
Jane Mayer has a long piece in the New Yorker this week about The Big Lie—the belief that Democrats stole the 2020 election from Donald Trump. She focuses a lot on the influence of the Bradley Foundation—which donates millions of dollars to conservative groups that promote election fraud narratives—as well as the Heritage Foundation, Turning Point, and other right-wing organizations dedicated to the notion that election fraud is widespread.
It's a good enough piece, but not really anything new. I did my own version in 2012 and dozens of others have written similar articles over the years.
So what makes this time different? Obviously one difference is that it was a presidential election being challenged and the president in question was Donald Trump. And maybe that's all.
But it's noteworthy that over the course of 8,000 words Mayer doesn't once mention the fact that The Big Lie was was promoted relentlessly for more than two months by Fox News. The Bradley Foundation is a pipsqueak by comparison. If there's a reason that more than half of all Republicans think the race was stolen, it's twofold:
Fox News has spent the past two decades scaring its viewers into believing that an enormous nationwide effort to steal a presidential election is exactly the kind of thing the Democratic Party would do. They have both the predatory desire for power at all costs to motivate them and the scary Deep State means to pull it off.
Fox News spent all of November and December reporting with a straight face on literally every single allegation of fraud, no matter how nonsensical.
This is why I keep insisting that we pay more attention to Fox News. I know it's been around forever. I know we've never been able to make much of a dent in it. I know it's kind of boring. I know there are shinier toys around these days to distract us.
But Fox News is still the main enemy of decent government in the United States, and it will stay that way as long as its brand of fearmongering earns the Murdochs truckloads of money and the rest of the conservative movement takes its cues from them. It's hard for any right-wing meme to gain big-time nationwide exposure without support from Fox News, just as it's hard for any right-wing meme supported by Fox News to fail to catch on. They're still the 800-pound gorilla in the conservative movement.
Is Fox News really the reason we're all so angry about politics these days? You can read my case for the prosecution here, and then you can read a critique from Dan Drezner here. Dan makes some good points that others have also made, which prompts me to make two points of my own in response.
First, and most obviously, I agree that there are no monocausal explanations for things like this. In particular, I give Newt Gingrich credit for being the godfather of American outrage politics in the early '90s. However, although he may have been first, he sputtered and imploded pretty quickly. It was Fox News that picked up the ball and turned it into a relentless 24/7 money spigot starting around 2000. Similarly, social media has probably made things worse over the past few years—though by less than many people think—but the real rise of outrage politics happened between roughly 2000 and 2015. Clearly social media played no role during that period.
More generally, there were lots of things going on over the past 20 years that played a plausible role in our broken politics. I won't even try to list them all. However, I'm aware of most of them and agree about their odiousness. I just don't think they're the major actors in fomenting political rage over the past couple of decades.
This leads into my second point. Dan says that "elite polarization" far predates the year 2000, and he's right. The wellspring of modern polarization was the counterculture movement of the '60s, with its liberal emphasis on civil rights, gay rights, and feminism. The subsequent switch of Northeast liberal Republicans and Southern conservative Democrats to the opposite party played out over the '70s and '80s and produced the ideologically polarized parties we have today. Robert Bartley played an underappreciated role by turning the Wall Street Journal editorial page—with its highly influential readership—into a take-no-prisoners conservative juggernaut beginning around 1978. Finally, in the early '90s, conservative actors like Rush Limbaugh, Matt Drudge, and Newt Gingrich brought everything together in the sweep of the 1994 election by a cadre of ultra-conservative true believers. From that point on, Republican elites were fully bought into the radicalization of their party. A decade or so later Democrats began to follow suit, though with different factions playing the radicalization role.
This is all a longwinded way of saying that I agree with Dan on this point. But polarization is not what I care about. I care about explaining anger and rage—and while polarization may help that along, it's neither necessary nor sufficient.
To build up rage you need to deliberately and relentlessly feed it. That's what Fox News does, and it's never relied especially heavily on polarization. Rather, it relies on a single-minded dedication to finding and exaggerating things about liberals that are most likely to induce fear and fury in its viewership. That's the battle plan Roger Ailes put in place and that Rupert Murdoch funded: not just conservative advocacy per se, but making liberals into objects of rage. This is the machine primarily responsible for the destruction of American politics over the past couple of decades. Newt Gingrich may have created the blueprint, but it's Fox News that engineered and won the insurgency Gingrich only dreamed of.
So is there anything we can do about Fox News? I think there is, though I suspect that even hardnosed liberals may quail at its incivility. But that's a subject for another post.
I am in Rome and only barely following current events. Nevertheless, I can summarize the latest COVID-19 news for you:
The Delta variant is bad. It spreads very quickly.
However, all of the vaccines are very effective against it. They strongly reduce your chance of contracting Delta; and if you have the bad luck to get it anyway, the vaccines massively reduce the severity of COVID.
So get vaccinated if you prefer not to die. The vaccines are extremely safe.
And just suck it up and wear a mask unless you're at home or in uncrowded outdoor settings. Is this overkill? It might be. But then again, it might not be. We don't know for sure. So just do it.
That's about it. This is what all the latest research and all the various announcements (Ptown, "breakthrough" cases, etc.) add up to: If you don't want to die, get vaccinated. Nothing has really changed.
After taking thousands of pictures with my current set of batteries, my camera has suddenly decided they're no good. Sometimes things work normally. Sometimes the camera tells me I have an incompatible accessory but then works normally. Other times it tells me my battery is unacceptable and just shuts down. It does this with all three of my batteries.
After years of working fine, my tablet no longer likes my wired keyboard. It announces that the keyboard is drawing too much power and refuses to connect.
I can't send email with my usual client. This is normal overseas, where I have to use my provider's web client. But it won't let me log in. I did a password reset, which went fine. But the web client still won't let me log in.
What's going on? Am I suddenly radiating some kind of tech-destruction field?
The killer among these three is the camera battery. If my camera decides to permanently go into shutdown mode, I'm screwed. As near as I can tell, there is no place in Rome to buy a replacement. Needless to say, this is a Sony firmware issue, not a genuine battery problem. Thanks a lot, Sony.
What's happened to all the Roman cats? I haven't seen a single one yet. However, to tide us over until I do, here's a lazy brown tabby at the Largo Argentina cat sanctuary.
The economy grew at an annual rate of 6.5% last quarter. Wow! But the news was nearly ignored because everyone is afraid the Delta variant will wreck the planet again.
It probably won't, though. So go ahead and feel good about this. And if you have any un-vaxxed friends, offer them a cookie if they'll get themselves vaccinated.
Yesterday's puzzler turned out to be more puzzling than I intended. This was partly because I forgot that it's hot pretty much everywhere and partly because you guys assumed I must be in the United States. But no! This should make everything clear:
July 27, 2021 — Vatican City, Italy
Huh. What am I doing in Rome? Well, a few weeks ago I read a piece in the New York Times telling me that tourism hadn't yet gotten back to normal and Rome was all but empty. That sounded great, so on the spur of the moment I decided to go. Marian was going to come too, but it turned out that her passport had expired, so I decided to come by myself.
Which is just as well, as it turns out. Rome is very, very hot right now, which would make it a bit of slog no matter what. However, this trip was also an experiment to see how much energy I had these days. The answer is: not much. I can walk around the city for about two hours before I need to return to the hotel to rest. I can do this two or three times a day, and to make it worse I fall asleep a lot. This very post, for example, is being written at about 7 pm after I fell asleep around noon. This does not make for ideal touristing.
But maybe things will get better. For now, I think I'll head out to the Spanish Steps or maybe the Piazza Navona and see what's going on there. Dinner is most likely in store.
Mother Jones has chosen my vacation to release my latest piece for the magazine. I can't blame them for that, though. Since I don't work there anymore they didn't know I was taking time off. Anyway, the payment for the article financed the vacation, so it all worked out well.
The piece is about why we're all so pissed off these days, politically speaking. I've been working on this for over a year, and I'm far from the first person to take on this subject. But the more I looked into it, the more I got convinced that everyone was ignoring the real problem. Or, at least, not giving it the credit it deserves.
The first thing to ask yourself is when this all started. In some sense, it began in the '60s, the wellspring of the culture wars. But we managed to survive for several decades after that without wanting to slit each others' throats.
Then there were Rush Limbaugh, Drudge, and Newt Gingrich. I give Gingrich credit for being the intellectual force behind our polarized politics, but he only lasted a few years and then faded away in ignominy. That doesn't really fit with (it turns out) the early 2000s being the point when fear and hatred really skyrocketed.
Timo Lenzen
So what happened? It can't be social media, which only took off a few years ago. It's not an increase in conspiracy theories, which are no more popular then they've ever been (honest). And it's not likely to be material circumstances, since on a wide variety of topics most us are better off—or at least no worse off—than we've ever been. There are a few exceptions, but they just aren't numerous enough to wreck an entire country.
No, the only answer that really fits is an old, familiar one: Fox News. Many liberals don't remember this, but when Fox News started up in 1996 it was a fairly generic center-right newscast. But around 2000 that changed and Fox increasingly adopted the hard-nosed attitude it maintains to this day. Why? Maybe it was the 2000 election. Maybe it was 9/11. Maybe someone did some market research. I don't know.
In any case, around 2000 Fox became ever more vicious at the same time that its audience really began to grow. Liberals weren't just bad, they hated America. They were unpatriotic. They wanted to tax away all your money and give it to, um, you know. White America was on the precipice and there wasn't much time left. Etc.
The result has been not just polarization, but a genuine fear among many conservatives that if liberals are allowed in power, the America they know and love is doomed. And that's the heart of the anger and hatred that power our country today. You may hear a handful of Republicans finally criticizing Donald Trump, but you'll never hear any of them criticizing Fox News, the organization that put him in the White House in the first place. That's because they know where the real power lies.
There's much more to this, so I urge you to read the whole piece. Just click here. Let me know if I've convinced you.
